Rebels Unraveling: A Short History of the Confederacy

This is not the Confederacy as imagined by secessionists or mythologized by white supremacists but the Confederacy as it really was--a rapacious state unraveling from the beginning. The imagined Confederacy was a projection of enslavers' ideology, a united South in which all, free and enslaved, would sacrifice everything upon the altar of Confederate nationalism.Blessed by God, the enslavers believed their cause a just and holy one on behalf of 'liberty' and 'independence' in the face of Yankee aggression and the Lincoln administration's existential threat to their way of life.Most of this was a lie: White Southerners were deprived of no liberties in the Union, apart from the presumed right to expand slavery indefinitely; the Confederacy stood for no liberties, especially among its large, enslaved population.The rest was a delusion: Secession would not unite Confederate society but expose its mortal rifts.Offering a political, military, and social history of the Confederacy, Rebels Unr